On The Elevator

There was rain last night. There was rain, and as he’d stood on the corner with its fingers tap-tapping on his shoulders and its voice whispering in his ears he hadn’t loved it at all. Rain was like that, the same way life was: you watched it through the window and heard it on the roof, a-pattering away as the sky drummed on the world like a child hitting pots with a spoon, and you loved it. You loved the way it looked and the way it smelled and the way it tasted when you breathed in that rain-scent through the screens on your window, and you went to bed and slept like a baby. Then you walked outside the next day and it was all dead worms in the street and ruined newspapers in oiled over puddles that soaked you from below while the cold wetness pouring out of the sky soaked you from above, and with each drop that exploded on your head and seeped through your hair you hated it more and more, until finally, drenched and miserable, you walked inside and tracked mud and filth over everyone else’s mud and filth on what had once been someone’s pristine tile floor. That was how rain was. That was how life was.

Joshua stared at the mess on the floor of the brushed steel elevator as made its excruciating ascent toward the nineteenth level, at the watery brown mockery of the soles of his fifty dollar wingtip shoes, smeared across the soles of other shoes that had stood here and straightened their ties, their nervous eyes flickering from the ground to the doors, from the doors to the ground. He straightened his tie. It wasn’t straight, it wouldn’t ever be straight. He straightened it again.

The elevator stopped at the tenth level. A woman got on. She looks familiar, thought Joshua as he shuffled over to his left and flickered his eyes in awkward silence from the ground to the doors, from the doors to the ground. You know who she is, he thought, his mind personifying itself, still trying to make him a character in a book or a movie like he’d always imagined. You know who she is, it’s Her. The woman with the long black hair, or is it dark brown? The woman with the green eyes, blue? Gray. The woman you know is beautiful in the same way you used to know you’d never die, the woman you told you loved her because that’s what you always knew you’d say to the woman you always knew you’d marry because that’s how it worked. It’s Her. You dated her, remember? For two years you kissed and whispered and ate dinners that tasted like any other dinner, at places that charged you a hundred dollars to sit in a dimly lit room, at a table with a silk tablecloth, while a man in a suit served you wine that tasted like any other wine and spoke softly over the elevator music that played on a loop from cleverly disguised speakers in the ceiling. You married her, don’t you recall? You passed her a three thousand dollar ring you’d kept inconspicuously in your pocket all evening, and she cried. You didn’t know why, you hadn’t done anything special like you always thought you would, like pay off the wait-staff to sing or put it up on the scoreboard at a ballgame. But she cried. She cried again when she left you, and maybe that time it was your fault.

Floor nineteen. The doors opened. Joshua straightened his tie.

As the elevator passed the twenty-second floor, the woman fixed her short blonde hair, and wondered where she’d seen that man before. Oh yes, she thought, I saw him through the window last night, dancing in the rain.